2015年6月10日 星期三

Not So Dismal After All；Inequality: What Can Be Done? By Anthony Atkinson.

09 June 2015

Not So Dismal After All

“Not so dismal,” ran the headline in The Economist. Early every summer, the city of Trento in the Italian Alps hosts a four-day festival of economics that punctures the idea that economics has to be a “dismal science.” Banners of famous economists hang over the medieval and Renaissance streets, huge orange tents host temporary bookstores, politicians (this year the Prime Ministers of Italy and France) rub shoulders with journalists, and a gigantic screen broadcasts lectures to crowds in the square outside the cathedral—a necessity considering the overflow from the packed palazzos, theaters and public buildings that host the free talks.

Sir Anthony Atkinson has been working on inequality and poverty for more than four decades. He was an academic mentor to the young Thomas Piketty and they worked together on building an historical database on top incomes. Sir Anthony has now published his own book on the subject, and its prescriptions are even more radical than Piketty's. http://econ.st/1IhtPBy

*****

A new book on inequality, written by Sir Anthony Atkinson, is quieter, shorter and more direct than “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty http://econ.st/1MstihO